A Teenage Con
by goaliegirl12
Summary: Nick Halden is a simple, everyday kid. Except for the fact that his real name is Neal Caffery, he is the most wanted art forger in the world, he's a brillant mathmaticion, and he is 15. Peter/Neal father/son type of thing.
1. Chapter 1

**All rights go to the creators of White Collar and all that stuff. I own none of it, and if I did Neal would be MINE! Enjoy!**

"Mr. Halden!" A shout from the math teacher pulled Neal Caffery from his day dream. He looked up at the teacher, becoming his alias, Nick Halden.

"Yes Mr. Elric?" Neal asked innocently. The teacher was not fooled by that act.

"If you have time to day dream, then you must already know the answer to the problem on the board." Mr. Elric said. "Why don't you come up here and show the class?"

Neal sighed and went up to the board, picking up a marker. He completed the problem easily, it was simple compared the other problems Mozzie had him do.

When he finished, he looked up at the teacher with a bored expression on his face. Mr. Elric on the other hand was turning red. "Go back to your seat Mr. Halden, and don't let me catch you day dreaming again."

Neal nodded and returned to his seat. He wasn't day dreaming, he was thinking about the art heist he was pulling next week. He was nearly done with the forgery, and was thinking about the best escape route from the museum.

When the bell rang, Neal got up and hurried to his next and favorite class: art. They were working on copying paintings, and Neal was working on a rather famous Raphael.

"That's the guy who cashed those bonds?" Peter said, staring at the back of a guy who was no older than 16. He looked between Jones and the bank manager. "He's just a kid!"

"Who makes a damn good forgery." Jones said, watching the tape some more. "And rather good at remaining unseen. Look! He avoids all camera angles so we can't get a shot of his face. Kid's got skill."

"Well, keep searching, see if you can get anything from these bonds." Peter said, gesturing to the perfect looking papers in evidence bags. "And see if you can get anything, a reflection, eye, mouth, ANYTHING on James Bonds!"

Jones nodded and left the conference room with the bank manager. Peter looked the forged bonds. Hell, even he couldn't tell they weren't real. Everything was perfect, right down to the tri-colored seal. Whoever this kid was, he was going to make his job a hell of a lot harder.


	2. Chapter 2

**I do not own any of the White Collar stuff. I don't really know who does, but could they sell Matt Bomer to my school? We are an all girls school and would appreciate the eye candy!**

Neal carefully hung the painting back into place, the forgery perfectly fitting. The original was already rolled up in a special case for it, and Neal was ready to get out of there. He pressed a button that Mozzie had installed on his belt, and the cord suspending him above the red motion sensors that covered the floor of the museum pulled him up and into the vent from which he was suspended from. The security here was a joke. He had been more challenged robbing one in Chicago when he and Mozzie went there for a week.

Carefully, he removed the clip holding his cord and replaced the vent entrance. Checking to make sure the original was secure on his back, Neal crawled through the maze of air vents until he found the one that opened to the ally on the side of the building. As silently as he could, he removed the grate that separated him from the ally below.

Swinging out and grabbing the ladder on the side of the building, he balanced himself as he put the grate back, then began his climb down. Once on the ground, he removed a coat that normal, non suspicious teenager would wear in October from his back pack, and stuffed the hat and container containing the painting inside. Neal swung the back pack on his shoulder, making it seem like he was just a kid coming home late from the library.

Looking like an average person, he joined the foot traffic of New York on a Tuesday night at midnight, which wasn't much. Five minutes later he walked into an old apartment building and up to the fourth floor. He unlocked the door using his keys, his least favorite way to unlock the door, and walked into the apartment he shared with his best friend, Mozzie.

"Whose there!" A frantic voice called out from the kitchen. "I am armed and ready to pounce!"

"Relax Moz, its just me." Neal said, shutting the door and bolting it shut. "Put the fork down and come take a look at this."

A balding man, probably about college age, walked out from the door leading to the kitchen. He was short, and a reddish tinge on his cheeks showed Neal that he had been right about the fork.

"Welcome back." Mozzie said stiffly, coming over to where his young friend was removing the painting from his backpack. "Any issues?"

"None." Neal said, flashing Mozzie a million dollar smile. "Here, I have school tomorrow so I need some sleep. Do whatever you want with it."

"I already have a fence picked out." Mozzie said excitedly, returning to the kitchen with the painting as Neal trudged down the hall to his room.

He had a bad feeling about this heist, he didn't know what it was, but something had him feeling off. Shaking it off, Neal collapsed into bed, barely remembering to set the alarm for school.

"That's a forgery!" Peter shouted, looking at the painting in front of him. He was no art expert, but even he could tell that it was good.

The museum manager nodded stiffly. "Yes. This is a particularly good one, but we do a weekly cleaning of each of the paintings, and our authenticator clarified that this was a fake."

Peter could only stare at the Raphael in front of him. He marveled at the detail that the artist had put on everything. Peter himself was not artistically inclined, but he had a certain respect for those who were, as long as they used their talents for good.

"Okay, how can you tell?" He questioned the manager.

"Because when we pulled it off its display area, we found this." The manager flipped the painting around to see a little half sheet of paper.

Peter walked up to the paper and examined it. His faced started out as confused, but then it grew into a large smile.

"Jones!" He called out, and waiting a moment for his friend to enter his office. "I need you to bring up a list of students that attend Kandle High School. Search for the name Nick and see how many of those attend an art class there."

Jones nodded and left, while Peter could only stare at the little sheet of paper in front of him. It was a sheet that a teacher had used to grade a student on his project. The student got a perfect score, and under teacher's notes it read

_"Great job Nick! I thought it was the real one!"_


	3. Chapter 3

**All rights go to the creators of White Collar, the usual blah blah blah. Thank you all for the glowing reviews! Oh and I've been trying to figure out how people get that line break, because I know I get so confused when people jump from different people with no line break, and I want to apologize for doing that you guys!**

Neal was chatting with a girl from his History class when he saw the suit that was tracking him down. They were on their way to Art class when Neal saw Peter Burke, the federal agent in charge of his case; leave the room with a project they had done the week before, one that had his handprint all over it. It was a paper mache cast of his hand, and painted on it was the skyline of New York.

Neal had to do his best to break the cover of a charming young man as he hid his panic. He had to get home, to Mozzie. If the suits knew his alias that meant his cover was blown. And that meant he had to leave, quickly.

As hard as it was to not give into fear that every time the door opened in each of his classes, to run away. But it was not a Fed, and he made it through the day with only minimum panicking. The only thing that gave away that any of his teachers knew anything was the jump his art teacher stuttered over his name. He already figured the FBI had talked to her so they could get his art project.

The moment when the last bell rang, Neal dashed out of school as fast as he could without drawing any suspicions. He raced up the stairs in the apartment building and threw open the door, but quickly shutting it and locking it behind him.

"Neal? Is that you?" He heard Mozzie call out from the kitchen.

"Yea. Mozzie, we have a problem." Neal called back, and walked swiftly to where the balding young adult was sipping some wine.

"What's wrong?" Mozzie asked, secretly hoping that Neal was just have personal life problems, instead of the kind of problem that could really screw both of them over.

"The suits found me. I don't know how, but they did." Neal told him, panic in his eyes.

Mozzie's eyes grew wide, and he stood up abruptly. "Okay, we need a plan of action. We can hide out at Wednesday for a while! Go pack your things, I have some things to burn."

Neal nodded, and went to his room. He was about halfway done packing his art supplies into a bag when he remembered something important.

"Mozzie!" Neal shouted as he ran back into the kitchen to see Mozzie lighting a match above a pile of shredded papers.

"Gah! Neal don't do that when I'm playing with fire! You know what happened last time!" Mozzie shouted, startled and dropped the match on the pile of papers.

"Yea, your right, we don't want to blow up another warehouse." Neal muttered. "But we have another problem. I left the safe at school."

Mozzie's eyes widened for the second time that day. At the beginning of the year, Neal, with the shorter mans help, had installed a safe in his locker to keep any real paintings that were too hot to sell right away, but cool enough to keep them. They contained quite a few big name pieces.

"You do realize that although my safe's are pretty much impossible to pick, the FBI does have mini explosives for this kind of thing." Mozzie said slowly.

"Yea I know, but there's only one way to get it." Neal said, taking a seat at the table, as far away as he could from the pile of burning paper.

"You mean going back to school?" Mozzie asked. "That's crazy! We can just brake in tonight and take the safe! Its so much easier."

"Mozzie, you hacked into the school security system before I even enrolled there. There are few blind spots, and all of them are plain walls with no possible entrances or exits." Neal argued. "And we don't even know what the patterns of the security guards are. Usually we have a few weeks ahead of time, but we can't pull one right now. Plus, if the Feds show up tomorrow and discover the safe yanked out of my locker, they will know for a fact that I was guilty. If I go to school tomorrow, I can remove the safe carefully and put the wallpaper on the back up again."

Mozzie looked down at the now just smoking ashes of paper. They had disabled the smoke detector in the kitchen a while ago because of Mozzie's pyrotechnics obsession, so the smoke didn't set it off.

"Alright, but I can pull you out of school early. Is there anything else you need to grab?" Mozzie asked, sighing in defeat. He had a bad feeling about this plan.

"I need to stay for Art class. I have a few forgeries in progress in there. It gets starts at 12:30, I think you can pull me out at 12:45 to be safe." Neal explained.

"Okay, I'll be there. Now go finish packing. I will move everything to Wednesday while you are at school." Mozzie ordered. Neal flashed a nervous smile and hurried back to finish up.

WCWCWCWCWCWCWCWCWCWCWCWCWCWC

Peter was typing on the computer when Jones came in.

"Got something for me?" Peter asked without looking up.

"Yep, we got a match." Jones told him. "But there's a small difference than what we originally thought."

Peter looked up at Jones, who was holding a blue file. Jones extended his arm to let Peter take the file quietly.

Peter opened the file to see a young kid, no older than 10, with shaggy dark hair that went down to blue eyes. Well, one of them. One of the eyes was swollen shut and there was a large cut on the kid's cheek. The name on the file is what caught him off guard.

"Neal Bennett?" Peter asked out loud. Jones nodded.

"When the kid was ten, he was taken from his home and put into foster care. A mugger killed his mother when he was five, and his father was arrested for child abuse when he was ten." Jones explained. "Neal was put into a foster home once he got out of the hospital, but ran away two weeks later. That was also the time he found out that his father had escaped from prison. Both have been missing since."

Peter just sighed as he looked at this file. Most criminals came from a broken home, and he couldn't help put feel some pity for the kid.

"Run facial recognition against the school." Peter order, closing the file.

"Already done." Diana said as she entered Peter's office. "He's enrolled at the school under the name Nickolas Holden. Straight A's, perfect attendance, and marvelous comments from all of his teachers, except his math teacher. The man just mentioned something about how Nick, or rather Neal, never pays attention in class."

"Okay. Get a team together and meet me in the conference room in five. We need to make a plan of action to grab this kid tomorrow." Peter ordered. Diana and Jones nodded, and went to do his bidding.

Five minutes later, about fifteen agents, including Diana and Jones, were in the conference room.

"Okay guys, I have permission from Hughes to take Bennett while at school. We are going to go in at 12:35 on the dot. The kid is in his Art class then. He is at the corner farthest from the exit and its one the second story of the building." Peter told them. "Hughes issued us fake guns. They look real, but they don't fire any bullets. We don't want to endanger any other children from the school."

The team nodded. Peter smiled, they were going to get that kid.

**I'm so sorry it took so long to pop out this chapter. I've had it written for a few days, but never found the chance to type it. It was about halfway done before I had a paper due and crap like that. Plus its hard to type when your parents are constantly telling you that its just a waste of time and no one really reads it. I'm going to probably pop out a few more chapters soon, just for a little teenage rebellion. Live long a prosper!**


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